John, Lovelock. Scudboat, in here.
A New Look at Life on Earth Lovelock.
Lovelock: With friends like these who needs friends.
Lovelock's imagination has given the world many gifts.
British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population
of just a billion people.
Lovelock proposes that the Anthropocene began with the first application
of the Newcomen atmospheric engine in 1712.
Lovelock went on to say that plans to sequester carbon
were a waste of time, crazy and dangerous.
No models project the atmosphere to behave so linearly-
partly for the same reasons that Lovelock identified when he proposed Gaia theory.
Lovelock finally stepped back from his doomsday interpretation
of climate change last week, but he's still got a lot of the science wrong.
One theory, proposed by the chemist James Lovelock, suggests that the Earth is just a single organic super-system,
where all individual creatures act as components of a self-regulating whole.
It's OK to toss around ideas like this with friends at a bar, but someone as influential as Lovelock should do his homework before sharing his thoughts with the world.
In his 1979 book, Lovelock provides some elegant insights into how life affects the atmosphere-
the thin layer on the Earth's surface where weather operates and sunshine penetrates to varying degrees.
Lovelock is not a climate scientist,
and he continues to misinterpret the climate science even in his retractions in an MSNBC article, as Joe Romm has pointed out for Climate Progress.
At its most extreme, it suggests that democracy is the problem, not the solution--
as veteran earth scientist James Lovelock once said,“climate change may be
an issue as severe as a war.
James Lovelock had recently discovered, during a cruise in the South Atlantic
in 1971, that almost all of the CFC compounds manufactured since their invention in 1930 were still present in the atmosphere.
A chemist by training, Lovelock contributed vastly to the movement to see our planet
as a living system in which animals, plants and bacteria play key roles in shaping the environment, including the atmosphere.
Perhaps Lovelock, like many of us, had hoped for a repeat performance by calling
attention to how the changing atmospheric was contributing to a dangerous condition- in this case, a warming and shifting climate.
Gartner research vice president John-David Lovelock says,“Although political uncertainties pushed the global
economy closer to recession, it did not occur in 2019 and is still not the most likely scenario for 2020 and beyond.
Lovelock then went on to say that is is
wrong to assume that humanity will survive 2°C of warming, and that at 4°C of warming the planet will only be able to support about one-tenth the current human population.
Which is to say, that when James Lovelock says humanity only has one
chance left not to get annihilated by the effects of climate change in the 21st century, it's worth shutting up and listening to what the man says.
My 2010 book Life in the Hothouse- which delves into this evidence to re-examine how Gaia theory applies to the ongoing warming-
was written in part to help counterbalance Lovelock's overly active imagination as laid out in The Revenge of Gaia.